July 21, 2024: very soon we will mark the 30th anniversary of the murder of Tammy Lynds, so I thought it would be an opportune moment to develop a timeline of that date exactly three decades ago, as well as developments that took place shortly thereafter.
Needless to say, timelines are important—essential, actually. In cold cases, as years go by, different interpretations can mold facts in different ways. Everyone has their own versions, but verifying timelines can disentangle myth from fact.
By reconstructing the last night Tammy was seen, July 21, 1994, we know that she snuck out shortly after midnight, according to her sister, Allison, and planned to return about 3:00 a.m. She didn’t come back. No disputing that.
Fortunately, we have an account from her friend, Will (not his real name), of her whereabouts a few hours before she left her home. We have recently discovered that she was at his house, down Tammy’s street, Lamont Street, earlier in the evening. Will said Tammy was there until about 7:00 p.m., when he walked her back home. “She was grounded, but she was only allowed here [his house] because she was like family,” said Will. “I guess she was grounded HERE. We were having a little get-together.”
“How did you feel about Tammy?” he was asked. “Were you in love with her?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I cared about her a lot.”
“Have you ever told anybody about this?”
“No.”
“Had you ever told her?”
“Yes.”
Indeed, Will let Tammy know that night that he was romantically interested in her. “I also knew that she had other guys, and I told her if were to work on a relationship, she needs to break it off with the other guys and be serious with me.”
However, this was left unresolved. The talk turned to the subject of their friends, Jay Francis and Owen (not his real name). “They were both planning to have sex with her, but Jay also had another plan because—there were times I hung out with them where I overheard them talking, especially with [name redacted], how they wanted to hurt Tammy.”
To help Tammy protect herself that night, Will gave her a knife with “a wooden handle,” he said. “It’s an old cutting tool. I guess it can be used for cutting carpet.”
This is basically the description of the knife police found under Tammy’s skeleton off Fox Road. At the police station, detectives showed it to members of the Lynds family, as well as Tammy’s friend Ricky Stebbins, and these are their drawings of it, as detailed in Part 6 of this series:
This is Richard’s drawing of the knife he was shown:
Ricky Stebbins did an internet image search and pulled the following likeness:
“Later on that night, after I walked her home, I bumped into Owen, Lumpy (Jason Francis’ nickname) and Pete (not his real name ),” said Will. “They were just walking around, and we walked back to Owen’s house.” Then these guys were left around 11:30 p.m. to go to a 'party.'”
Will used his fingers to provide air quotes when he said “party,” indicating possibly nefarious intentions.
By the way, every word Will said above can be verified, and Will himself had agreed to the interview.
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Let’s press the rewind button and go back even further.
Again, we know that later Tammy left her own house, heading south on Lamont Street, shortly after midnight, but it certainly helps to even revisit the hours before she went to Will’s house, when Susan’s co-worker and her three children visited the Lynds, with plans of dinner (pizza from Tony’s Pizza) and a game of hide-and-seek among the kids. The co-worker’s son, Steve (not his real name), did not look forward to these visits, in which he said Tammy’s parents, Richard and Susan, always drank heavily. Sometimes, to avoid dealing with the Lynds family, he would ask his mother to drop him off at Colonial Estates down the road, where he lived until the summer of 1993 and still had lots of friends at those apartments.
It was better than dealing with the dramas on Lamont Street. “Sue was always yelling,” he said. “Josh and Allison would cry, and Tammy would slam doors. I never liked going there. I didn’t like what I saw. I would usually walk to Colonial Estates with my younger brother, while my sister and baby brother would play with Tammy, Josh, and Allison. Sometimes we would stay because they would beg us to play hide-and-seek.” Every so often he would comply, but he was very reluctant. “Tammy and Sue fought constantly,” he said.
Sure enough, in the late afternoon of July 21, Steve said mother and daughter were battling again, and Richard was intoxicated. Steve and his brother helped pick Richard up after he drunkenly fell, and practically carried him to his living room recliner. “He was out of it,” said Steve. “Drunk as a skunk.”
Richard, before he died, denied this, saying he gave up alcohol in 1982. “I don’t know why Richard disputes the drinking, unless he just doesn’t want people to think they were alcoholics,” said Steve. “I can understand that.”
Tammy asked Steve’s family if she could sleep over their house in Connecticut. “My mom said no,” said Steve. “We had moved to Connecticut on July first, so we were staying with my uncle and aunt until November while our new house was getting ready, and my aunt never allowed us to have company. Sue was yelling at Tammy as we were getting in the car. Then we saw Tammy run in the opposite direction of where we were headed.”
Because they were driving toward Fargo Street to Boston Road, Tammy would have been running south on Lamont Street in the direction of both Will’s house and the woods where neighborhood kids gathered. Steve said this was around 5:30 p.m., which makes sense in the timeline, because that would have meant Tammy was later at Will’s for roughly an hour-and-a-half. “My mom was tired of the atmosphere, and we left,” he said. She had warned Susan in the past that this drinking and bickering act was wearing thin on her, and she had meant it.
And as we know from an earlier blog post, that night Tammy told Steve’s 12-year-old sister Jill (not her real name) that she was abused by her boyfriend, who she said she would be meeting that night, and when Tammy was ever late to their get-togethers, he would hit her. “The last thing Tammy said to my sister was that she would be late, and her boyfriend was going to act out,” he said. It was painful for Jill, who was interviewed by police in 1994, to recall this memory. “She choked up over the phone.”
What did Tammy do between the hours 7:00 p.m. and midnight? This is not so clear. Did she resume fighting with her mother? Susan later found a summer school assignment Tammy had completed that night for the next day—one of the reasons the family believes she didn’t have the intention of running away. So she must have been doing homework. According to one report, Susan saw her in her room at 11:30, but we don't know how accurate this account is.
Richard always maintained that his guests stayed later—until at least nightfall, because he said it was dark out when they left. At some point he fell asleep in his chair, he said, until Tammy nudged him—apparently just after midnight—and told him to go to bed. Then, unbeknownst to him, she went out the front door, never to return.
“I would drive back to Connecticut sometimes because my mom would have a few drinks, but nothing like Richard and Sue,” said Steve, recalling that it was still very much light out when he drove his family away. “It was sunny,” he said. “I wore sunglasses on 91.”
After Tammy went missing, Steve and his family came all the way up from Connecticut and helped Susan search for Tammy, with him and his brother facing the potentially dangerous task of looking by city parkland where the homeless camped. “My brother and I would search the woods on North Branch across from Colonial Estates,” he said. “Lots of people lived in those woods down by the marsh, closer to Grayson Drive where it would cut off by Lucerne Road. Susan had my mom go down to Moss Road and hand out fliers with Tammy's picture. Susan said she would walk down Fox Road. Richard was never there. Never helped. Susan claimed it was too hard for him. I never respected him after that.”
However, according to Richard’s detailed timeline below, he had searched for Tammy both alone and with Allison.
Steve said he and his family helped Susan search for two weeks, and “then she didn’t want our help anymore. Did she totally give up after all these years?”
Last year, Richard reached out to Steve in an effort to get ahold of his mother and her recollections of the last night Tammy was seen alive, but Steve didn’t want to stress her because of her serious illness, and he remembered that Richard and Susan had lashed out at his mother the day of Tammy’s funeral:
“The last time I saw the Lynds family was at her funeral,” said Steve. “Her parents verbally attacked us and blamed us for Tammy's death.
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Yes, it also helps to have Richard’s timeline of events, which is listed below. Interestingly, someone called the Lynds home on November 6 identifying himself as a police officer and seeking information, such as what Tammy was wearing, “to update their computers.” However, on November 7, 1994, the police’s Youth Aid Bureau told Richard the Springfield Police didn’t call them the previous day, and chalked it up to a “prank phone call.”
Also, Richard’s timeline detailed his reaction to being an initial suspect in the murder and asked to take a polygraph. The results were inconclusive.
Police told Richard in 2013 that he was no longer considered a suspect, and no one has been publicly identified as one for 30 years. Do they have any three decades later? Good question. No answer. Yet. As I wrote in the last post, stay tuned.
